I Found The Best White Noise To Write To, And It's...
ADHD gang, assemble!
Hello readers and the nosy people sitting behind them,
Last week’s post, 101 Differences Between New York and LA, garnered a lot of positive reactions, so obviously this is totally different. I will keep your collective love for list-based jokes in mind for the future!
Substack is doing this thing where you can “pledge a future subscription” for newsletters that currently don’t have a paid tier (like this one), and apparently mine was $150??!??? I thiiiiiink I disabled that, but please let me know if the site still asks new subscribers for current or future payment, as LLIAG is completely and totally free.
Today’s tract is about putting myself in the headspace to write, but a headspace is hard to visualize, so picture me at Danielle Steele’s writing desk, which is made of giant Danielle Steele books:
My Hunt For The Perfect Writing Soundtrack
Call it ADD/ADHD, the result of watching too much TV growing up or a consequence of being an only child: I pretty much always have something On in my apartment. Podcasts, movies, the running monologue I deliver to my cat. I keep a book by the toilet (TMI? Sorry); I fall asleep to sitcoms; I shower to 80s music. The noise doesn’t stop when it’s time to write.
Over the years, I’ve had various companions in creativity. In school and at the office, it was music. When I started freelancing full-time, I switched to workplace comfort shows like Parks and Rec, The Office and 30 Rock. I theorized that watching people be “at work” helped me feel like I, too, was at work, and not on my couch, in my underwear. Next time you’re being lazy, put on a West Wing episode where there’s some kind of crisis and see if that doesn’t snap you out of it.
After a while, I became a kind of sommelier of hubbub, pairing each activity with the perfect score. In quarantine, I needed something that mirrored my feeling that the world was ending, but also provided easy escapism and pretty people to look at. Enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The podcast “Blank Check” breaks down how each ingredient in the movie-making process — directing, casting, script, score — adds to the whole. What better to listen to while you cook?
I’m not alone. People are watching TV while they play video games and scrolling TikTok while listening to audiobooks (of the books they found on TikTok). Japan has media immersion pods. It’s nothing new; soap operas were born to provide a little company while housewives did chores.
For an over-thinker like m’self, there’s a psychological benefit. Background stories give the “let’s make up strange scenarios and plan our Halloween costume” part of my brain something to do so the rest of my brain can get down to business. The things that upset me most are, of course and unfortunately, the things I come up with in my mind, but I can’t hear those thoughts over the sound of, say, Emily in Paris, which the New Yorker aptly categorized as “ambient TV.” (You’re supposed to look at another screen while it plays; it’s not even interesting enough to merit your full attention.) A fidget spinner of the mind, if you will.
I’m not sure how Thoreau did it! Leave me alone with my thoughts and I will write you not a masterpiece but a nightmare about my shortcomings, or else just daydream past my deadline. Numbing? Compartmentalizing? An anxiety coping mechanism? I don’t know the right term for it, but it keeps me on an even keel so I can keep sailing (wow!! perfect boat metaphor).
What works even better is something called “body doubling,” the grown-up version of parallel play, wherein two adults get unpleasant tasks done by…being in the same place. It’s what makes co-working spaces and cafés better than home offices. It’s why people like to read at the library. The way I understand it — or at least, the way I experience it — is that occupying the same space as someone else lowers the psychological hurdle to a task. I don’t need to find the discipline to write if I can just piggyback on my friend Alex’s motivation.
Proof of concept: once a month or so I have friends over to sit in quasi-silence and work on our scripts. Even then, we keep the TV on. Alex’s method was to play a video of the Titanic sinking in real time. She had to keep working til the Titanic was underwater. Then I introduced her to the Pomodoro Method (25 minutes of work, 5 minute break, rinse and repeat). You can find a Pomodoro timer to suit any season or mood on YouTube, and that’s what we usually go with.
YouTube will also help you body double. You can “study with” Rory Gilmore (and a host of other fictional nerds) or live with this Harvard Extension student. This video, three hours of a young woman’s hands writing notes and highlighting paragraphs, has been viewed eleven million times. For the Zoom version, sign on to Edit Party, a 24/7 silent writing hang. On the go? There’s an app too.
I find the screen-based body doubling just a little too sci-fi to be helpful, and cafés, sadly, close, which brings me back to the everlasting hunt for Something To Watch While I Write.
It’s a tricky balance. Podcasts require too much attention, bird sounds not enough. SVU is too violent; reality shows are too stupid; music is too emotional. I thought Lord of the Rings would be good, but it’s not; Aquaman, weirdly, is. Here’s some stuff that works: Taylor Swift concerts, Godzilla movies, Harry Potter movies, Percy Jackson movies, Netflix movies written by the algorithm (Gray Man, Red Notice), The Great British Baking Show (except that it makes me hungry), Sherlock, Molly’s Game, the Snyder cut.
Gathering stuff that hits the sweet spot has become a part-time job. After exhausting streaming services, I turned to YouTube, and the great Lindsey Ellis.
She’s funny, unexpected, erudite. Go watch her right now. Her videos are a little too good to ignore while I write, but they’re perfect for spicing up otherwise mundane activities, like cleaning my room, painting my nails or stretching my dumb, useless muscles. Or should I say, they were. I’ve now watched basically her entire channel, which she no longer updates, having left YouTube to write science fiction novels and occasionally make content for her Patreon subscribers.
(Ellis is often described as having been “canceled,” but IMHO what really happened is that she made a minor and totally forgivable mistake,and a bunch of trolls — who don’t actually care one iota about respect or social justice — seized on it as pretext to amp up the harassment and threats they’d already been bombarding her with. Which is both terrible to her and rude to people who try to educate others on the Internet in good faith, but now I’m on a tangent!)
I have spent, conservatively, weeks of my life combing YouTube for creators who will scratch the Lindsey Ellis itch, but dammit, I’m picky (you might have put that together by now). ContraPoints is too serious, Defunctland is too niche (the thing about the Disney theme was cute and all but could have been an hour shorter, as it was essentially a guy Googling), and anything where a man gives his opinion is…not allowed in mi casa. Sarah Z and Jenny Nicholson are okay but — I feel like a misogynist saying this — I don’t love their voices! Ashley Norton’s work is promising, but she’s young and fairly new, so we’ll see.
I must’ve been deep in a Wherefore Art Though Lindsey hole when I encountered Mike’s Mic (the guy whose Gossip Girl video I embedded in the January 31 post). His other content I don’t care about, but his TV recaps are legendary. He puts a ton of work into them, he’s very thorough and funny and not at all self-serious or analytical. And he just seems like a nice, fun dude!
(The accent cancels out my knee-jerk reaction to hearing a man talk like he knows anything.)
Whether you have seen the show in question is beside the point. Mike will fill you in, plus commentary on which moments were shocking to fans at the time or which storylines he particularly likes. Exposure to a show via Mike’s Mike is like the fun version of the Metropolitan theory on reading literary criticism:
Mike is a great pick-me-up on a rainy day. But most of the time I need something that’s 5% less interesting so I can devote that brain space to “work.” And after a bit of trial and error, I have found the apotheosis of Harmless Chatter To Write To. Introducing…
Cari Can Read
Cari, an elfin redhead who lives in Seoul with her husband, likes knitting, food, flowers, travel, and blogging about all of it. She’s also a voracious reader, dutifully documenting every 800-page epic she finishes with a picture of her e-reader next to an aesthetic beverage on a secondary Instagram account, created for this purpose.
She also has a YouTube channel where she talks about books, and this is the secret sauce, this is the special stuff, this is what’s been playing on my TV all week: Cari’s multi-hour summaries of the Sarah J. Maas bibliography.
Sarah J. Maas is a prolific and popular fantasy author whose books have developed a rabid following on TikTok, thanks in large part to the “smut” scenes and romances. I read the first in her most popular series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR), and thought it wasn’t very good. One day when the power went out, I literally tore the book up and used the pages as tinder in my family’s fireplace.
The plots in Maas’s various works are overly convoluted and arbitrary. A lot happens, yet little resonates.
Cari’s videos are long (the longer the better, for me), her voice is pleasant, and while she’s got a sense of humor, she doesn’t write jokes, per se. Her set-up is rudimentary: she holds a mic in one hand and a wand in the other, pointing at pictures of each character that she’s taped to the wall behind her. Sometimes she’ll throw in a special effect, but mostly it’s just a girl talking to the camera about faerie wars. Perfect.
While Mike of Mike’s Mic semi-ironically fangirls over shows that are intentionally ridiculous, Sarah J. Maas takes her work very, very seriously. But Cari does not take Maas seriously at all. She throws in the occasional dig and reads particularly egregious passages out loud. She’s not mocking the books or their fans, just looking at them objectively as an intelligent reader. And so her videos, unlike everything else I’ve mentioned here, soothe not only my anxiety but also my insecurity. If Maas can sell twelve million copies of her work even though Cari and I both clearly see her flaws…my spec script will definitely get me staffed! These videos appeal to my most petty and condescending nature, but heck, I’ll take motivation where I can get it.
Cari has mentioned that some of her views come from people whose partners are ACOTAR fans and who are watching her videos so they can talk about the series without reading the books. Others, I’m sure, are fans who, in the absence of an ACOTAR movie (a series is coming to Hulu eventually) enjoy seeing aspects of the book on screen. How many are like me, using them to both distract and stimulate? I don’t know. Hopefully, now that I’m sharing this incredible life hack with all of you, our numbers will increase.
But sadly, the clock is ticking. Either I will watch all of Cari’s videos before she posts her next one, or I will get tired of her and tune her out entirely. Either way, I’m going to need more soothing, slightly amusing content to quiet my subconscious. Any recommendations? Drop a link in the comments…
Ciao for now,
Lizzie
This so perfectly describes my brain, too. I can’t do anything in silence.